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Sadie Benning began making movies at age 15 when her father gave her a Pixelvision camera; she used the cheap, grainy technology to make short personal films. Despite her age, these films are stunning and insightful; this is a child’s game of dress-up that is also a brilliant recycling of film clichés and gender roles.
 Chick flicks: Miranda July critiques diva-hood in “The Amateurist,” screening in the “Bad Girls: Videos” installation at the UVA Art Museum. |
Her 1992 video, “It Wasn’t Love,” was made in her bedroom and feels like an adolescent art project: Characters (represented by Benning herself, in different outfits) tell the story of a crime spree/road trip to Hollywood shared by a cool older chick and an impressionable accomplice.
But Benning is hardly naïve. Rather, she appears full of confidence. This not a confession, but a performance: When the minimal story reaches its conclusion—“We didn’t make it to Hollywood, or even Detroit; instead, we just pulled into the fried-chicken parking lot and made out”—the story’s resolution is not as important as the way she tells it.
In Miranda July’s 1998 video, “The Amateurist,” an old TV screen repeats grainy images of a half-dressed woman posing lazily, while July watches the picture-within-a-picture and narrates for us, judging the performance with totally arbitrary criteria. The result is bizarrely inscrutable and weirdly funny.
July always seems cheerful and simple, but her work is always much deeper than it first appears. In contrast to Benning’s adolescent imitation of adults, July is the mastermind who plays dumb.
Watching videos in a gallery is always awkward—they play on a loop, and the audience arrives in the middle. The UVA Art Museum’s new set-up hardly helps; the original sound on these videos is already muddy, but the acoustics in the foyer allow for the slightest cough or shuffle to obscure it completely. Nevertheless, Sadie Benning and Miranda July have done fascinating work that deserves a wider audience and this show is a step in the right direction.
